Maps Just Latest Apple Online Service Fail (Viewpoint)

Below:

Next story in Tech and gadgets

To its credit, Apple usually gets things right. But when it makes
mistakes, the company takes a while to acknowledge them —
begrudgingly. Bad iPhone 4 reception? You're holding it wrong.

So CEO Tim Cook's recent mea culpa acknowledging the failure of
Maps in the iPhone 5 and any models updated to iOS 6 — more than
100 million individual phones — was a shocker in itself. "We are
extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our
customers," Cook wrote on Apple's site. But recommending
alternative apps that are better than Apple's own, including
Google's and Microsoft's, was unprecedented.

How could Apple nail it so well with the iPhone 5 (some Wi-Fi and
possible battery problems notwithstanding), but blow it so
badly with Maps? A lot of it came from failed negotiations with
Google, but Apple also has a long history of messing up online
services. And global mapping is an especially complex service.

Apple's Waterloo moment is still MobileMe, an online syncing
service for Apple mobile devices and computers that launched in
July 2008. The service was meant to sync email, contacts and
calendars between any combination of iPhones, iPod Touches, Macs
and PCs. It also synced Web browser bookmarks and provided online
file storage. MobileMe launched with frequent outages, delayed
syncing, garbled sync data and sometimes lost information.

Even tech columnist Walt Mossberg, frequently accused of being an
Apple fanboy, wrote, "Unfortunately, after a week of intense
testing of the service, I can’t recommend it, at least not in its
current state … The problems I am citing are systemic."

It was especially infuriating for users because they had paid
$100 per year for the service (while Google offered and continues
to offer many similar services for free). Until today, MobileMe
had been Apple's biggest moment of humility.

MobileMe's successor, iCloud, does seem to have gotten things
right. But it largely copies what services like Google and
Dropbox have been offering for years.

Then there's Ping, Apple's attempt at a social network, built
around music, that was integrated into iTunes. The service
launched on September 1, 2010 and will close down this Sunday
(Sept. 30). A deal to connect it with Facebook fell apart,
leaving Ping as an under-populated island. As Cook said on May
30th (as reported by Wired), “We tried Ping, and I think the
customer voted and said this isn’t something that I want to put a
lot of energy into.”

The iTunes online marketplace, by contrast, has been a great
success, one that remade the entire music industry. Apple hasn't
figured out this whole streaming music thing that may be taking
iTunes's place, however. ITunes is still successful, so Apple may
not want to mess with a good thing. But meanwhile, Pandora,
Spotify and others are building great services, and Apple is
nowhere to be seen.

Apple does stream video to its current Apple TV, set-top box. But
even there, the company had to include Netflix streaming to make
the product more appealing. (Netflix works great on the Apple TV,
by the way.) The box also features Hulu+, YouTube and Vimeo,
among others.

Apple made a similar move to allow other networks in when it
integrated Twitter into its last mobile operating system, iOS 5,
and then its latest computer software, OS X Mountain Lion. It's
now brought Facebook into the mix, too, with iOS 6.

But despite its new enthusiasm for Twitter and Facebook, Apple
doesn’t use the networks very effectively. Its Facebook page has
about 7.6 million likes. That's pretty good, but Coca Cola has
nearly 51 million. Coke regularly posts on its wall, garnering
thousands or tens of thousands of likes and often hundreds of
comments per post. Apple's Facebook page is bereft of posts.

Fortunately, there are workarounds for Apple's Internet glitches.
People who don't want to use iCloud (or who don't own Apple
products exclusively) can use Google instead. Google works
perfectly on Android, of course, but it also easily syncs email
and contacts on iOS devices. (A $2 app called AllSync allows it
to sync calendars, too.) And Dropbox can sync most everything
else.

Plus, Pandora, Spotify and other music-streaming services make
apps for iOS, as do Netflix and Hulu+ for video. (Kindle and Nook
ebook apps are also available.) And thanks to Tim Cook, we also
have a list of Maps alternatives: Bing, MapQuest and Waze in the
App Store, as well as the Web-app versions of Google Maps and
Nokia Maps.

Cook's public humbling over "Mapsgate" might be considered a sign
of weakness. But in coming clean in the first week, and even
proposing alternatives, he's showing that Apple recognizes its
mistakes and wants to help out customers. If Apple really learns
from these mistakes, it may have a brighter future online.